2y ago

I made the mistake of checking Reddit (using my last few days of Apollo) and came across a complaint about Lemmy that flabbergasted me

Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?

To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?

22 comments

"The hosts are too lazy" says the person whining about it without doing anything.
Try switching to a platform you've never used before and making a community out of nothing, or host the Lemmy instance and be forced to deal with thousands of new users daily. Lazy my ass...

I'm ok with the Lemmy plain designs.
- I'm just glad it defaults to dark mode. Any site that defaults to light mode can go straight to hell.

It's about personal preference. It's important to have a user interface that's modular and comfortable for the end user and manageable for the devs. Options are always the answer, the ability to enable or disable certain aspect or details is what drives me towards one app or the other. (This is coming from someone who used Infinity for Reddit for the past 4 years.)

I think the more they bitch about Reddit alternatives, the more people will be reminded that there are alternatives to Reddit.

I think Lemmy could use some more ads. I feel like I don't have enough material things, and I don't know what to buy. /s
- I also would like to have content that makes people angry shoved in my face to keep me engaged.

The reason I used Reddit is Fun WAS because of its stripped down, bare bones style. I only wanted to read thoughts and opinions, and choose to view images/video/ads when I wanted to. This is absolutely a feature of Jerboa (and Lemmy) for me
- I don't know the background of OP so this is just an opinion: I feel that modern UX have become so ubiquitous and streamlined for content consumption that users who aren't used to old-styled UIs see the lack of "sleek" design as lesser. It works doubly so that users aren't willing to venture outside of their ecosystems and will put up with anything regardless if it's detrimental to their experience.
  Compare users of new reddit and the official app vs. users of old reddit and 3PA. I used 3PA because there wasn't an official app and RiF matched what I was used to. It's a similar phenomena to Apple users vs Windows/Android. People are just used to a streamlined sleek experience (which to be fair has it's merits) but to say it's superior or that the alternative is lesser is a large misstep in thinking.
  It takes effort to go out of your comfort zone but it's saddening to see users mindlessly, for lack of a better terms, consume

I'm here to read think and talk. I like it simple.
- Yeah, for real. "But there's no fun awards and bubbly icons and bright colors."
  Well then, go back to kindergarten.

I use a grease monkey script to make it basically identically to old Reddit. It’s wonderful. Highly recommended
- Which script do you like?
  
  I'm using the compact version of lemmy_monkey and a script I wrote to force external links to open in new tabs (reddit did this automatically so I constantly forget to press the middle mouse button and then get annoyed that my lemmy scrolling is gone)
  Compact lemmy_monkey: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469093-compact-lemmy-to-old-reddit-re-format-observer GM-Open-NewTab: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469196-gm-lemmy-newtab
  Both observe on all http*:/// but they both use the same "isLemmy" check to determine if any logic should actually execute, so while it seems a bit rough at first they are not doing anything nefarious or unnecessary besides a single js comparison of the head elements.
  
  These are the most important ones I use.
  Kbin Enhancement Script User: @SirPsychoMantis
  Add domains to magazines and users for federated content
  Collapse comments
  Collapse replies
  Replies start collapsed
  Move comment box to top
  Fix comment buttons and add a cancel button
  Blur / Hide NSFW domains (thanks to u/leel)
  Hide random posts
  OP tag in comments
  All features can be toggled on and off
  Improved Collapsible Comments User: @artillect
  Improves the comment tree layout and adds a line that lets you collapse replies
  Floating Subs List User: @raltsm4k
  Adds a floating subscriptions pane to kbin similar to Reddit
  Supports filtering by name and sorting by subscribe date (default) or alphabetically
  Kbin-Unsquash User: @shazbot
  Unsquash inline images in threads by replacing with source image and downscaling to 50%

I do use Lemmy because the whole thing with Reddit just sucked, but holy hell yeah, new Reddit looked so much better. It's not the world, I can get used to it and it's fine, but the preference is clear.
- Reddit is ridiculously slow in the last several years. When I click CMD+F to start search I need to wait several seconds because of all the JavaScript running.

I love the simplified interface. I do wish I could have a 'Front Page' view that creates an equivalent Community of all my subscriptions.
- Isn’t that just switching the feed to “subscribed”?
  
  Yeah that's all it does. It doesn't actually create the equivalent of Reddit's Front Page.

I definitely miss Reddit's stylesheets. Giving mods control over the page's CSS was just really neat. Everything had an individual flair

22 comments